Servants (Ivan Ostrochovsky, 2020) (Patreon)

Although I hadn't remembered it until I checked my logs, I did see Ostrochovsky's debut feature, a film from 2015 called Koza. It was the story of a washed-up boxer trying to make a comeback because of financial distress, and it was shot to look like a documentary. (Most of the principals were playing thinly fictionalized versions of themselves.) I mention this only because Servants, whatever its shortcoming, represents such a radical shift in sensibility. No one would ever mistake Ostrochovsky's sophomore entry for reality. It is stylized in the extreme. Every shot and composition, fussed over to a sometimes oppressive degree, broadcasts the film's high-art ambitions.

Shot in stark black and white and presented in Academy ratio, the film seems to be closing in on its subjects. As it happens, Servants is a localized story about oppression, and so its claustrophobic film style is not inappropriate. It takes place in a seminary in Bratislava in 1980. Czechoslovakia allows the Catholic Church to function, but it operates under the authority of a group known as Pacem in Terris, which is an ecclesiastical front group for the Communist Party. And so the priests and students must decide whether to cooperate with the authorities, thereby keeping the seminary open, or to resist in the name of the true church. 

The two newest students, Juraj (Samuel Skyva) and Michal (Samuel Polakovic) arrive and are slowly learning both the rituals of their school life and the subtle ways in which members of their cohort demonstrate their resistance, a hidden network that eventually bubbles to the surface. The question is, how will the church elders respond? The dean of the school (Vladimír Strnisko) is already compromised. The most sympathetic priest (Milan Mikulcík), who is being blackmailed, tries to negotiate on their behalf, but he cannot avoid the inevitable crackdown.

What is most unusual about Servants, apart from its Expressionist depiction of inside-out corruption, is its characterization of state power. The agent of the state, in this case, is one Dr. Ivan (Romanian star Vlad Ivanov). We see him in policy meetings, dumping bodies of dissidents, exacting confessions, and performing all of the usual functions of a Communist enforcer. But Ostrochovsky and Ivanov take great pains to show Dr. Ivan's exhaustion and ennui. He takes no joy in ruining the lives of young men, or murdering men of the cloth. Twice we see him brushing mud from his shoes -- a nice pair, not really suitable for the task of dumping a body in the lake. But then we realize they are probably his only pair. Servants is a study of bureaucratic Stalinism in its death throes, when evil had past the point of banality and entered the realm of the somnabulant.